Giuseppe Navarra took the Treasure of San Gennaro back to Naples, and from then on he was nicknamed "The king of Poggioreale". The jewels of the Treasure of San Gennaro are valued more than those of the Crown of England and those of the Csar of Russia. The first evidence of the liquefaction of the saint's blood goes back to the 14th century: a miracle that occurs every year for the believers in Naples. San Gennaro is so important for the people of Naples that even Napoleon, prone to embezzle works of art, did not dare to profane the Treasure: in fact he suggested in 1808 to his in-law Gioacchino Murat, king of Naples, absolutely secular, to offer the saint a holy monstrance, still among the most highly decorated of the whole collection. During the Second World War, the Treasure had to be transferred to Rome for some years and even the Vatican stalled for some years its return to Naples. Memorable remains the endavour by Giuseppe Navarra, most devoted boss, called "The King of Poggioreale" (the area of Naples where he came from) who, after the war in 1947, ran the risk of transferring the precious cargo from Rome to Naples. At the end of the Second World War no one dared to take the honor of carrying a valuable treasure through devasteted roads infested by criminals. The police didn't have enough men and the civil and ecclesiastical authorities did not know where to turn. Then he volunteerd for the operation. Mister Michele Navarra, aka Giuseppe, 49 years old, former driver, left Naples towards Rome with a strange Fellowship of the Ring: the nonagerian Prince Stefano Colonna Paliano. With an autographed letter to the Vatican, he withdrew the Treasure and then began an adventurous trip back home. When the Treasure was finally handed back to the town, Cardinal Alessi Ascalesi offered him a reward, but Navarra refused the money, asking him only the privilege to kiss the sacred ring and asked his reward to be converted into a donation to the poors of the city. This fact helped to increase his fame: actually he was a shady character, who had become rich with shady trades, first in Marseille then in Naples.

Amo Napoli perché mi ricorda New York, specialmente
per i tanti travestiti e per i rifiuti per strada. Come New York è una
città che cade a pezzi, e nonostante tutto la gente è felice come quella
di New York.I love Naples because it reminds me of New York, especially for the many transvestites and garbage on the streets. As New York, it is a city falling apart and, in spite of this, people are as happy as the ones in New York.

"Nowhere man" is one of the Beatles' songs that appeared in the album "Rubber Soul" in 1965. The song appears in the film Yellow Submarine, where the Beatles sing it about the character Jeremy Hillary Boop after meeting him in the "nowhere land". The Nowhere Man is a lot like the Fool On The Hill. He is making all of these plans for no one, has no opinion or point of view, but that is what makes him free. It is what isolates him from everyone, and at the same time, makes him like everyone else. Could it be that the nowhere man is Man before the original sin?

Lennon claimed that he wrote the song about himself. He wrote it after racking his brain in desperation for five hours, trying to come up with another song for Rubber Soul. Lennon told Playboy magazine:

"I'd spent five hours that morning trying to write a song that was meaningful and good, and I finally gave up and lay down. Then 'Nowhere Man' came, words and music, the whole damn thing as I lay down".

In this display case lies a message of the negotiation of reality in favour of a utopian one, of fantasy, of imagination. It's a reflection on what we claim to be, on how we define ourselves. We could claim there is no earth, no human beings, as we are used to define them and how we represent them. What is the ratio of existence, how can we prove that the Being is there? Basically, there is still no verification of what is just an hypotesis. Almost all of our logic is the attempt to formulate an hypotesis about reality, if a phenomenon is as we describe it. Now the technique is what allows us to validate an hypotesis; the technique subservient to our purposes: build a house, have more food, change the human body...In the "Critique of pure reason", Kant argues that you can't see the noumenon: we can only see the phenomenon of what we call reality through the senses and through the thought. What is the Reality we can not know. Take the colors, for instance: by assumption we define them and give them a name, but we can't be sure that they exist; we cannot know if animals perceive them, how they perceive them, if we know all the colors of reality, and so on...We have only five senses and through them we have a perception, and this perception is what we call reality. If we had others organs of perception our idea of reality would change, like if we had the sensors of other species, like the reptiles or the fish. Human beings can perceive reality only in relation to our peculiar sense organs.

The thought is a system of understanding based on the assumption of what we call reality. We live in a hypotetical world: we have objects that work by our theories and the only confirmation we have is their effectiveness.

A paradox is an assertion, a statement, a thesis, an opinion that, by its own content or by the way it is expressed, seems to be opposite to the common belief or to the verisemilitude, hence turning out to be amazing, or unbelievable, or odd.

The title of this work is taken from an interview that the Italian artist Claudio Parmeggiani granted in February 2002 to Sylvain Amic: "We know time less than anything else...we are like children playing on the banks of the infinite". The background of the display case is the image of an installation that the artist created in 2008 at the Collége des Bernardins in Paris. In the works by Parmiggiani there is a poetic mutation of the objects having a violent symbolism: violent in the sense that it is capable of arousing strong feelings, of bestowing associations in silence. In his installations I appreciate the archetypal significance revisited with his themes, which he composes architecturally in a tidy way. My work can be defined as a folk surrealism because it is related to the principle of psychic automatism mentioned by Andrè Breton: practical and not abstract figurative art, through a close dialogue between objects, including unusual combinations and unreal distorsions.

The approach to Surrealism was different from artist to artist for the obvious reason of the personal dissimilarities of those who interpreted it. But, in its essence, the technique of Surrealism can be split into in two main categories: that of unusual combinations and that of unreal deformations.

Max Ernst, a Surrealist painter and sculptor, thus explained unusual combinations, starting from a sentence by the poet Comte de Lautréamont: "beautiful as the unexpected encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table."; he stated that such beauty came from "The coupling of two seemingly irreconcilable reality on a plan that is not apparently convenient for them."

I work combining objects and spaces seemingly unrelated to obtain new semantics.

This procedure serves the purpose of shifting the meaning: the displacement of the objects, that we are used to perceive on the basis of common sense, into visions that convey the idea of in a different order of reality.

Inside this unusual fold there are some sheep. It is the first homage to the painting by Pelizza da Volpedo (1868-1907) "The mirror of life" (GAM-Modern Art Gallery, Turin) , whose subtitle is: " and what one does, the others do". This sentence is taken from Dante's "Divine Comedy", in the Purgatory, canto III, verses79-84:

"As sheep come issuing forth from out the fold
By ones and twos and threes, and the others stand
Timidly, holding down their eyes and nostrils,

And what the foremost does the others do,
Huddling themselves against her, if she stop,
Simple and quiet and the wherefore know not"